Ham, Did you actually read the article? The thrust of it is that morality and our sense of beauty arise from our evolutionary heritage. We are biologically hardwired to sense some things as good and some things as bad. Reason is a capacity in humans that evolved much later and it serves primarily to clarify the built in heuristics that emotions provide.
Krimel _________________________________________________ Hi Platt -- > I wrote a comment to the NY Times about the column entitled > "The End of Philosophy" by David Brooks that I told you about. > Out of 446 comments received the editors chose 11 to highlight, > one of which was mine: ... Congratulations on "getting published" in the Times, and thanks for providing this reference. I'm dismissing Mr. Brooks' politics for the moment, because this op-ed piece is lucid, relevant, and well worth reading on its own merits. I don't know why he titled it 'The End of Philosophy', since his message is that philosophy has actually expanded into moral and esthetic study. But I was particularly interested in his (or author Gazzaniga's) take on human values as individual "preferences". "As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, 'Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.' ... "In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, 'The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.' ... "The third nice thing is that it explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice. Moral intuitions have primacy, Haidt argues, but they are not dictators. There are times, often the most important moments in our lives, when in fact we do use reason to override moral intuitions, and often those reasons - along with new intuitions - come from our friends." In some ways this psycho-emotional rationale for value and morality lends more support to Essentialism than to Pirsig's philosophy. In fact, I've decided to run it on next week's Values Page. (It won't be the first time a source cited by Platt Holden has appeared on my website ;-). Thanks again for keeping us posted on reviews of philosophical interest. Best regards, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
